April 20th Coronavirus Updates from the Trump Administration

Guidelines for Opening America Again

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “Since we released the guidelines to open up America again, and this was two days ago, a number of states led by both Democrat and Republican governors have announced concrete steps to begin a safe, gradual, and phased opening.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “Texas and Vermont will allow certain businesses to open on Monday, while still requiring appropriate social distancing precautions.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “As our experts said yesterday, America’s testing capability and capacity is fully sufficient to begin opening up the country. Totally. Indeed, our system is by far the most robust and advanced anywhere in the world by far. The rest of the world will tell you that.”

Key Progress

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “The United States has produced dramatically better health outcomes than any other country with the possible exception of Germany, and I think we are as good or better. On a per capita basis – remember that – on a per capita basis, our mortality rate is far lower than other nations of Western Europe.”

Testing

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “America continues to make steady progress in our war against the virus. As of today, we have tested 4.18 million Americans, that’s a record anywhere in the world.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “The United States has now conducted more total tests than all of the following nations combined: France, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, India, Austria, Australia, Sweden, and Canada. And our testing is expanding very rapidly by millions and millions of people.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “[Tomorrow], the President and Vice President will lead a call with our nation’s governors from FEMA headquarters with the nation’s governors to review what more they can do and do together to develop locally tailored testing strategies, working very hard with governors now on testing.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “Many governors are still relying on their state laboratories rather than the full and much larger capacity that is available to them – as an example, commercial laboratories like Quest and LabCorp.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “You must remember, that the governors wanted to have total control over the opening of their states, but now they want to have us, the federal government, do the testing. And again, testing is, is local. You can’t have it both ways. Testing is a local thing.”

VICE PRESIDENT PENCE: “A month ago, we had done 80,000 coronavirus tests in America. This weekend we cleared more than 4 million and we’re currently testing more than one million Americans a week. We fully expect to actually have tested more than 5 million before the end of this month.”

Supplies of Medical Equipment

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “We’re close to finalizing the second partnership through which a U.S. manufacturer would convert its existing plant to produce over 10 million additional swabs per month and we should be ready to announce this in a very short period of time.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “We also are going to be using and we’re preparing to use the Defense Production Act to increase swab production in one U.S. facility by over 20 million additional swabs per month.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “We’re working with the world-class team at Oak Ridge National laboratory to use its injection molding capacity to potentially produce over 10 million collection tubes per week.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “My Administration continues to execute our massive military operations to supply our hospitals with equipment they need, and beds if necessary but it looks like we’re totally covered on beds. We have plenty of beds.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “The federal government is currently procuring more than 100,000 ventilators through new production or purchases, with thousands already delivered.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “I want to thank the Dynamic Ventilator Reserve because what they’ve done is incredible, that’s a capital D.V.R., by the way, an innovative public-private partnership … We’re gaining access to up to 65,000 additional ventilators in hospitals across the nation that can be redeployed very quickly to areas with the greatest need when they’re not in use, and we right now have almost 10,000 in our reserve.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “Through the Project Airbridge, we’ve completed 64 flights carrying over 600 million pieces of personal protective equipment, such as gloves, gowns, and other medical gear, with 50 more flights scheduled in the very near future.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “FEMA is working to commit another $384 million to produce another 64 million gowns … I want to thank America’s textile manufacturers for their partnership in this remarkable undertaking. Two U.S. companies, Hanes and Standard Textile, are on track to produce 5 million gowns by the end of the month.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “Honeywell is hiring more than 1,000 American workers to produce 20 million masks per month — 20 million masks a month. Thanks to the Defense Production Act, we’ll be receiving another 40 million masks over the next few weeks. … This production is, in addition to the 55 million N95 masks my administration has already distributed. Plus we ordered – and it’s coming in soon – 500 million masks.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “We have secured nearly four times as many N95 masks in recent weeks as we would in the entire healthcare industry during a typical year.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “This pandemic has underscored the vital importance of reshoring our supply chains and bringing them back into the United States, where they belong – where they should have never left.”

VICE PRESIDENT PENCE: “5,528 military personnel have been deployed across 24 hospitals and facilities and 28,700 National Guard are on duty.”

VICE PRESIDENT PENCE: “At the present moment, we have more than 9,055 ventilators on hand. We actually added 91 ventilators to that supply because of the production that the President and our task force at FEMA has activated. In the next seven days, we’ll be adding 576 ventilators to the strategic national stockpile.”

Resuming Elective Surgeries

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “CMS is finalizing new guidelines for doctors and patients to resume elective surgeries.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “As long as the rate of infections remains low in a community, we want patients to be able to go to their doctors, get clinically tested, and have worked on, surgeries.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “If your doctor believes you need a treatment in person, you can get a treatment now. You can and should get a treatment now. We are asking that healthcare facilities have plans in place to keep patients safe during their visit.”

CMS ADMINISTRATOR VERMA: “We are issuing guidelines today about how we can reopen the healthcare system. So, these are recommendations around phase one. … Healthcare officials across the country, and healthcare systems, need to decide what services should be made available. And ultimately, doctors and patients need to make decisions about their healthcare services. We want to make sure that systems are reopening so they can stay open and doing that in a very measured way.”

Precautions in Nursing Homes

CMS ADMINISTRATOR VERMA: “Today, we are announcing that we are requiring nursing homes to report to patients and their families if there are cases of COVID virus inside the nursing home. We are also requiring nursing homes to report directly to the CDC when they have cases of COVID virus.”

CMS ADMINISTRATOR VERMA: “FEMA’s also working on a plan to make sure that nursing homes have the supplies that they need.”

CMS ADMINISTRATOR VERMA: “Just last week, we increased the reimbursement in the Medicare program for high-throughput tests and we are also paying for labs to go to out to nursing homes to collect samples. And that’s going to really support efforts on nursing homes in order to isolate patients.”

New Treatments and Therapeutics

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “We’ve launched an unprecedented effort to develop new treatments and therapies to battle the plague.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “We have some things that are looking good. Really looking good. We call [it] COVID Treatment Acceleration Program. We’re accelerating all of these great companies that are looking and we have government agencies looking too, NIH. This extraordinary program is slashing red tape to speed and development and to – rival – and, and if you look, if you look at what we are doing in terms of the speed, it is unrivaled.”